Visual Evaluation of XPath Queries

Over the past one decade, due to its simplicity and flexibility, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is rapidly gaining in popularity as a universal data format for data exchange and integration on the web. In this paper, we present a novel framework to evaluate a variety of XPath queries in a very user-friendly manner. We developed a prototype system named VXPath, which is a visual XPath query evaluator that allows the user to evaluate an XPath query by clicking the nodes in an expanding tree instead of typing the whole XPath query by hand. Our system supports various XPath axes, including child, descendant, self, parent, ancestor, following-sibling, precedingsibling, predicate and so on. In order to handle XML documents in very large size, instead of loading the whole XML document into memory, we extracted a concise data synopsis termed structural summary from the original XML document to avoid the loading overhead for large XML document. We evaluated our system over the data from XMark and DBLP and our system can handle large XML documents up to gigabytes.